It says here somewhere (I can't find it, now that I need it) that
you believe the Republicans can take the House back in 2010, and that
you're thinking of resurrecting the famous GOP "Contract with America"
which you assert was pivotal in the Congressional "revolution" of
1994.

As a libertarian, I have to admit up front that I was never very
sanguine about your "Contract with America", not only because (A) I
was never invited to sign my copy of it, or (B) to suggest amendments,
or (C) I never believed it had much to do with your party taking the
congress for the first time in 40 years (the simple truth is, voters
were fed up with Clinton, exactly as they are today with Obama), but
because, rather than a phony "Contract with America", what you and
your party need most (and have avoided for decades) is contact with
America.

Whenever you're out of power, you GOP guys talk a lot of brave,
fine-sounding talk about individual liberty. Let you get hold of the
reins, however, and what we've witnessed to our disgust, instead, is
blind carnage overseas and stultifying oppression at home. The wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the horrors of Guantanamo, Abu Graib, and other
places, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the gutting of the Bill of
Rights, it all got started on the GOP's watch. Never to forget Waco,
which was approved, planned, and rehearsed during the George H.W. Bush
regime.

Obama's crew are only taking policies like that to their logical
extremes.

And all you Republicans can say is that it worked. I thought it
was the left who are into situational ethics. What ever happened to
"The ends cannot justify the means?" It is not an adequate ethical
defense against an accusation of torture, to claim that the torture
worked.

And it's also untrue. But let's set that aside and move on.

The embarrassing truththe brontosaurus in the broom closet
that nobody wants to talk aboutis that the Republican Party was
never the party of freedom. That Goldwater business in the 1960s was a
fluke, immediately snuffed out by "older, wiser heads" in the GOP like
those of Nelson Rockefeller, Weeping Willy Scranton, Henry Cabot
Lodge, and George Romney. The Republican Party was created in the
1850s by northeastern mercantilists just like them, to crush the hopes
of poor southerners for individual liberty and independence, and keep
them bound in serfdom, paying 80 percent of all taxes collected in
America.

The one and only hope you have (and this will work only if you can
persuade us to believe you despite what we've seen you do time and
time again) is to lay out a detailed and coherent program that, in a
clean sweep, will get the vile, disgusting stench of socialism out of
the nation's nostrils once and for allnot secrete another layer of
it on top of what the Democrats have added to the evil work of the
Republican socialists Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. and
George W. Bush, and yes, the wise, benevolant god-king himself, Ronald
Reagan.

If you ever really open your eyes and look around you, the first
thing you'll discover is that Republicans made the mess we live in
today. You made the election of Obama inevitable. If you and Rush
Limbaugh had wholeheartedly supported Ron Paul, instead of spending
enormous time and effort trying to defame and marginalize him, we
wouldn't be in any of these messes right now. But you had to choose
somebody elseabsolutely anybody elseinstead. If you expect to
get the country backand if you want help from anybody elseyou
will have to acknowledge that, and stop doing the things that made it
happen.

And start doing things right.

I believe it was youwhen the integrity of the 1994 Republican
"revolution" was revealed to be paper thin, and the entire facade
began to collapsewho revived Voltaire's cynical observation that
"The perfect is the enemy of the good". The truth is that the perfect
is the enemy of the good enough. Or, not to put too fine a point on
it, the perfect is the enemy of the half-assed. If it weren't for
those of us who keep insisting on the perfect, there'd never be any
good.

It's vital that you understand that folks at the tea parties and
the congressional town hall meetings wereand remain todayjust
as fed up with Republicans who, through a weakness and stupidity that
seem almost genetic with them, failed America utterly (it didn't help
that a number of Republicans tried to grab credit for these mostly
spontaneous events) as they are with insane and evil Democrats who are
gleefully destroying what little remains of their lives, liberty, and
property.

It's vital in part because, increasing numbers of these people are
beginning to understand that, as bad as things have been under the
Obama Administration, and as much worse as they are likely to get,
enduring them is better than getting screwed overagainby you
Republicans.

If you want that to change, here is what you must absorb:

We are not the cops of the world. Every time we try to be, young
Americans die by the thousands, instead of living to discover a cure
for cancer, a better mousetrap, a good five cent cigar, a matter-
antimatter interstellar drive, or simply getting married and raising
their children and grandchildren in peace, freedom, progress, and
prosperity.

With each war come further restrictions on personal and economic
liberties that somehow never get relaxed again after the war is over.
We now have a population who have no sense of individual privacy,
dignity, or sovereignty, and will pee in a bottle on command, like a
lab animal, instead of pushing in the face of whoever demands it of
them.

As to economic damage, in the late 19th century, gold was twenty
dollars an ounce. Today it is more than a thousand. The differencea
matter of 5000-fold inflationis an accurate and sobering measure
of the rapacious greed for other people's money, the naked perfidy,
and the destructive stupidity of at least six generations of American
politicians.

The phrase "enemies, foreign and domestic" includes lunatics,
idiots, and villains who have plunged us into one pointless war after
another (in the process ingesting and consuming enough real wealth to
build a hundred Pyramids, Great Walls of China, or Hanging Gardens of
Babylon). The horrific events of September 11, 2001 happened, not
because somebody, somewhere hates our freedom, but because for a
century, this government failed to respect theirs, in the course of
whichas an "unintended consequence"it encouraged, empowered,
and enabled the Middle Eastern equivalents of the Ku Klux Klan and
neo-Nazism.

Those you bomb and torture today will bomb and torture you
tomorrow.

Changing the subject, remember that it's small business, not big
business, that is the foundation and future of America. The proper
balance between the two can be restoredand a great many other
problems solvedby tossing out the legal fiction of limited
liability.

Likewise, it's long past time to jettison the abusive and ugly
medieval practices of Sovereign Immunity and Eminent Domain, the
government equivalent of limited liability. We must rebuild America
instead, on a rock-solid foundation of inviolable private property
rights.

Don't waste everybody's time and energy trying to keep immigrants
out, legal or otherwise. People have migrated across the face of the
Earth in great numbers for thousands of years. No matter what you do,
they'll find a way in. Wouldn't you? Instead of trying to hold back
the tide, make these people into genuine Americans once they get here.
Post the Bill of Rightsin Spanishon every lamp post and phone
pole within a hundred miles of the border. Broadcast them into Mexico
and to other countries on TV and radio so that newcomers will know
what to expect. Abolish the welfare system altogether, and restore
medicine and other "social" services to the voluntary sector of the
economy.

Remember the Bill of Rights and keep it wholly. It's not a set of
arbitrary game rules to be gotten around for a "win". It's not an a
la carte menu you pick and choose items you like from, rejecting what
you don't like. It's the highest law of the land, to be stringently
enforcedwith all your heart, and all your soul, and all your
might.

While we're at it, the rule of law is not a luxury to be suspended
in an emergency, it's a dire necessity for our survival and that of
civilization.

The War on Drugs is over. Drugs won. It's time to stop wasting
money, destroying lives, grinding up the Bill of Rights, and giving
greater and greater power to the jackbooted thugs, in an unnecessary
and futile attempt to enforce one group's ideas about what chemicals
and vegetables some other group ought to manufacture, cultivate,
distribute, purchase, possess, and consume. Repeal the drug laws, and
prices will drop a thousandfold, driving most participants out of the
business.

That pack of grifters, thugs, and spies called the United Nations
has to go. Their openly-advertised antipathy toward the American Bill
of Rights (take a good look at the Colt Python sculpture in front of
their headquarters to see where they stand on the Second Amendment)
would be more than reason enough, but the Third World's slavering lust
to loot the United States (even further than it's already been looted
by the Obama Administration) makes it absolutely imperative. Kick the
vermin out, raze their building to the ground, and then construct
something useful (an indoor shooting facility would be nice) in its
place.

Regarding medical Marxism and the myth of global warming, both of
which are valued by so-called "Progressives" solely as excuses to
control every moment and every aspect of every individual's life: no
matter what abominations are passed into law in the next few days or
weeks or months, a genuine opposition party must commit itself now to
a Constitutional separation of scienceespecially medicineand
state.

That's a key concept, Newt. I hope you were paying attention.

Meanwhile, government must get out of the business of designing
automobiles and formulating fuels. There is no scarcity of energy, as
you know perfectly well. Only the market can create and distribute it
properly. If you want to do something congressional, investigate the
suppression of new technologies like catalytic fusion and thermal
depolymerization.

Above all, keep your religion in your pants. If it makes you
happy, I'm happy for you, butlike whatever else you have down
therenobody cares about it but you. If you don't like to drink,
smoke, or consume cheeseburgers, then don't drink, smoke, or consume
cheeseburgersand stop bothering those who do. The same goes for
drugs. If you don't care for same-sex marriage, don't marry somebody
of the same sex. (If you feel that your marriage is somehow threatened
by gay people getting married, it must be a pretty weak and fragile
thing.) If you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't like
evolution, then don't evolveunless you've got that one covered
already.

Victim disarmamentwhat its advocates call "gun control"is
more a matter of projection on their part than protection. They know
their own hearts and minds. They fear that they lack the self-control
and self-discipline necessary to use a weapon safely, responsibly, and
effectively. On the other hand, guns possessed by private individuals
who are fed up with police incompetence, corruption, and brutality
have reduced violent crime dramatically over the past twenty years or
so.

Any politico who's afraid of his constituents being armed, should
be. Leaders of the anti-gun movement (for the most part, politicians
who enthusiastically advocate confiscatory taxation and government
control of everything) realize that a populace is much easier to herd,
lootand dispose ofif it has been stripped of its weapons. The
naked fraud and transparent fascism of victim disarmament must be
eradicated through the repeal of all gun laws at every level of
government.

Do that, and in less than a generation, the great rivalry in this
country won't be between Republicans and Democrats, but between
conservatives and libertarians. "Liberalism" will be a relic of the
past.

The very existence of the Obama Administration is entirely your
fault, yours and that of your fellow Republicans, conservatives,
neoconservatives, and neolibertarians. Obama and his minions pulled
you all through a knothole backwards. They slid you down a 50 foot
razor blade into a barrel of alcohol. And you deserved every inch of
it.

Now you have just 13 months to convince us you can stop making up
excuses, rationalizations, and justifications, stop doing the same old
damned stupid things for the same old damned stupid reasons, and do
things right this time. I can help youfor a reasonable consulting
fee, of courseand so can half a dozen other genuine libertarian
thinkers I know. But you will have to pay attention and take good
notes.

which I urge you to download, print, put in an envelope with whatever
cover letter you might want (or none), stick a stamp on it, and address
the envelope to

Newt Gingrich
1425 K St, NW
Suite 350
Washington, DC 20005

and stick it in your local post-mail box. It would do Newt and his
myrmidons good to get a couple hundred or thousand of these.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of more than 25 books, including
The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability
Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles
and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased
through his website "The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Neil is presently at work on Ares, the middle volume
of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Where We Stand:
Libertarian Policy in a Time of Crisis with his daughter, Rylla.

See stunning full-color graphic-novelizations of The
Probability Broach and Roswell, Texas which feature the
art of Scott Bieser at www.BigHeadPress.com
Dead-tree versions may be had through the publisher, or at
www.Amazon.com where you will also find Phoenix Pick editions
of some of Neil's earlier novels. Links to Neil's books at
Amazon.com are on his website